Gold heists: Air Canada caper shows yellow metal’s criminal allure hasn’t dimmed

It’s a gold mine in the dead of night. Crooks snip through a wire fence and find keys to a forklift still in the ignition. It roars to life and smashes through the cinderblock wall of the refinery, then right into the strong room. Doré bars vanish.  

The tale is just one from the nearly 40-year career of Paul Gladston, CEO of Vancouver-based WGRisk. The boutique company was founded in the 1970s by Dale Wunderlich, a former United States Secret Service agent who investigated bullion crimes before then-president Richard Nixon removed the U.S. from the gold standard backing the dollar.  

The company focuses primarily on gold mine security in Mexico and Central and South America where organized crime groups and drug trafficking organizations are known to operate widely.  

“The threat there is obvious and the risk is extremely high,” Gladston said this month from London. “There’s everything from actual site invasions to the interdiction of product in transit on site or in transit on the road.”  

Click here for a list of the biggest heists

Just the insurance on gold mines and refineries is approaching an US$800-million-a-year global industry. 

Alamos Gold (TSX: AGI; NYSE: AGI) lost an undisclosed number of gold and silver bars in 2020 when armed men raided an airstrip serving the Mulatos mine in northern Mexico. They fled in a plane.

Armed robbers stole 7,000 oz. of gold in concentrate from McEwen Mining’s (TSX: MUX; NYSE: MUX) El Gallo 1 mine in Mexico in April 2015. The North Mara mine in Tanzania was losing about $31 million a year to organized crime before Barrick Gold (TSX: ABX; NYSE: GOLD) acquired it in 2019, the company said in an internal report released at a court case in September.  

Closer to home, police outside Toronto said this month there’s no new developments on cracking who showed a fake waybill at an Air Canada cargo warehouse near Pearson Airport in April. They drove off with about $20 million in bullion and cash.  

Companies typically do as little security as they can get away with, expert says. Credit: Adobe Stock Couperfield

Swiss gold 

Brinks is suing the airline for the full $20 million loss. The case will concern the contracts between two Swiss banks, Raiffeisen and Valcambi, and Brinks which was hired to move more than 400 kg of gold and US$1.9 million in cash from Zurich to Toronto. TD Bank was supposed to get the metal while the Vancouver Bullion and Currency Exchange was expecting the greenbacks.  

Brinks didn’t reply to an interview request for this article and G4S, another large security company, didn’t make anyone available in time. The Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa declined to comment about the case or say much about its security for obvious reasons. Air Canada was also mum.  

Almost all thefts of this type are likely inside jobs, according to insurance providers contacted by The Northern Miner. It highlights the importance for thorough background checks on employees along the route to ensure they’re not in a position where they could become susceptible to bribery or reasons to turn a blind eye. 

Many companies use underwriters at Lloyds of London, the marketplace that boasts it has never failed to pay a claim in its 335-year history. It has unlimited liability whereas an insurance company has limited liability.  

Theft analysis

WGRisk often gets called in to investigate after a theft and help represent the company in its probable fight with an insurance firm, said Gladston, a British Army veteran who started in mining with Cambior, now part of Iamgold (TSX: IMG; NYSE: IAG). He worked at the Omai gold mine in Guyana. 

“Companies do as much or as little security as they want to, and typically they do as little as they think they can get away with. When it goes very wrong, we come in and pick up the pieces,” he said.  

“Some companies may transport doré bars from the refinery to the local airstrip, not even an airstrip on their mine site but to a local airstrip, in the back of a truck covered up by a blanket,” he said. “Fifteen to 20 years ago it used to happen quite a lot, but now shipment procedures are highly detailed, extremely well planned and they have to be signed off by the insurance company.”  

One insurance provider recalled a mine in Canada that used a fishing tour van, with rods poking out the back, for transporting gold. It was a brilliant idea for putting risks in context, said the provider, who declined to be identified for this article because of company guidelines.  

Liability transfer

WGRisk negotiates on behalf of clients with custom refineries regarding insurance liability and the transfer of that liability. For example, a Canadian miner in Mexico may have a contract with the Asahi refinery in Brampton, Ont.  

“The custom refinery wants to minimize their risk and liability and maximize how much they can charge the client, and we want to do exactly the opposite,” he said. “They will determine the risk in liability exposures in transit for how that gold is going to get from point A to point B.”  

Despite efforts by the London-based World Gold Council to begin using blockchain to verify the integrity of gold bars, finding someone with the ability to melt down stolen gold isn’t hard and doesn’t even have to be run by organized crime, Gladston said. Most capers rely on inside information but accidents and mistakes like open vault doors and available forklifts can also play a part.   

“You can have the strongest door in the world, but if you drive a vehicle through the wall of a cinderblock building, it doesn’t really matter what kind of a lock or door you have in place.” 

Clarification: The robbery at McEwen Mining’s El Gallo mine took place in 2015. In the original version the year was omitted.